Wednesday, December 13, 2017

In recent years, the Manhattan School of Music's opera program has become a cabinet of curiosities: a clearing-house for little-heard versions of familiar operatic stories by unfamiliar composers. The latest of these, seen Saturday at the school's temporary performance space, the Florence Gould Auditorium at the French Institute/Alliance Francaise is Cendrillon, in a 1810 opera-comique by the Maltese composer Nicolo Isouard.

First they lost their leading lady. Then the conductor. The Cavaradossi quit. And then the second conductor. Now, Sir Bryn Terfel has become the latest artist to pull out of the Metropolitan Opera's increasingly troubled new production of Puccini's Tosca.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has always occupied an important place among orchestras that visit New York. They are near neighbors, and their regular appearances at Carnegie Hall are a linchpin of that august venue's concert programming. In recent years, the announcement that Philadelphia's music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin would be assuming that same post at the Metropolitan Opera has only served to raise the profile of these concerts.

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Critical Thinking in the Cheap Seats

Since 2007, Superconductor has grown from an occasional concert or CD review to a near-daily publication covering classical music, opera and the arts in and around NYC, with excursions to Boston, Philadelphia, and upstate NY. I am a freelance writer living and working in Brooklyn NY. And no, I'm not a conductor.